Calibrated for Kiwis

As a small country in the South Pacific, our uniqueness is often overlooked by health science researchers. Medical assessment tools are created and used based on research conducted in other countries with larger populations. While we have many similarities with these populations, we are not an identical match.

Which is why one of the priority research areas for Precision Driven Health (PDH) has been to create a website with authentic clinical risk assessments tools that are based on New Zealand data.

The seven-month project was led by Reece Robinson, Anna Spyker and Dr Mirza Baig and has delivered a public website that enables clinicians and the general public to calculate medical conditions and risks. Its cutting-edge capability ensures that risk tools, standard calculators, algorithms and trained machine-learning models can be operationalised and made available in real-time to clinicians at the point-of-care.

The website currently has 23 tools and calculators deployed and provides two experiences. The default setting is for the general public who might use it to calculate their Body Mass Index or take a short questionnaire to measure their depression or anxiety levels. The other experience is for clinicians and includes sophisticated calculators such as that used to analyse the Anion Gap – an evaluation of metabolic acidosis to determine the presence of unmeasured anions.

Dr Baig says a vast amount of evidence-based clinical knowledge is created for the purpose of advancing healthcare delivery, creating sophisticated treatments, and providing precise and tailored care plans – but it is often inaccessible to medical specialists and the general public.

“One major objective behind all these efforts is to provide patients and clinicians with current evidence-based knowledge for better management of healthcare delivery. So, we have set out to create a website where information can be easily available to the general public to know and learn more about their own health, or to clinicians to keep up with evidence-based knowledge enabling better point-of-care decisions.”

The website will be constantly updated to include newly developed tools from PDH research, such as the Perioperative Mortality Risk Calculator.